Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

I couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.

A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be

I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.

But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.

Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve.

Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them, sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly, are the true barbarians of our time.